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Australia was only one of the many countries to embark on a major program of management reform during the 1980s. A particular feature of the Australian approach was the attention given to the balance between aggregate budgetary control and performance at the organisational and program level. This emphasis reflected a perception that many overseas reform efforts had failed because they emphasised one of these elements, often at the expense of the other. Creating and maintaining an aggregate control framework which encourages improved organisational and program performance remains an ongoing challenge.

In this chapter we discuss how, as a tool for organizational change, action research can affect the development of cooperation between a traditional university and the external environment. The case analyzed was a two-year action research project carried out in cooperation with over 20 employers. This project was carried out at multiple levels and had several essential goals. Apart from its emancipatory role in the shift in the way students carry out their master's theses (toward application, implementation, where organizations become the research subject instead of the research object), the project's aim was to open up the university to cooperation with its environment and conduct useful research. The results indicate that action research through the democratization of the process of introducing changes and its bottom-up nature influences the development of real cooperation between the university and external organizations. Additionally, they contribute to the emancipation of university knowledge, its democratization, dehierarchization, as well as cocreation and sharing with cooperating organizations.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The chapters emphasise the importance of data management from the perspective of the business management process, where big data is the most crucial and pressing technical and business issue in the modern realm of technology. The same data has a significant influence on the current financial environment. Organisations are facing challenges in explicating complicated financial data manually and using it to drive their decision-making processes. Data-driven decision-making is a dominant tool for any professional. It enhances precision, alleviates risk, improves efficacy, aids financial management, offers customer insights, provides a competitive edge, supports strategic planning, enables performance tracking, fosters innovation and has predictive capabilities. The power of data makes the organisation more prosperous and resilient in the face of change. By making informed decisions based on data and analytics, organisations can unlock their full potential and achieve sustainable growth. The chapter suggests a data-driven culture in the organisation with the help of strategising in terms of data collection, analytics and data management by establishing governance and regulatory practices to ensure data security and integrity. The latter part covers the forecasting and transformative ability of data by integrating machine learning and deep learning models. The chapter also covers the visualisation perspective of the data by transforming the information into a visual setting, illuminating the hidden insights and making them tangible and relatable. The chapter closes with a suggestion for managers to stay competitive, make more reasoned and sound decisions and adapt to the evolving business environment.

This paper aims to synthesise the literature addressing opportunities for intervention and peacemaking in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). It shows that peacebuilding in PNG is actively practised in a variety of different forms and by a range of actors. It relies heavily on local champions and coalitions working together with “bits of the state” in inventive but, ultimately, highly vulnerable ways. It argues that the way forward is to better understand how the multiple resources in and beyond the state can be networked more effectively to engineer peace at many different levels, from the clan to the nation state.

The paper is based on a thorough review of the scholarly and grey literature concerning peacebuilding and conflict resolution in PNG over the past 30 years.

The key insight is that peacemaking and non-violence interventions in PNG need to be understood as requiring three different categories of treatment: quick, short interventions; ongoing, slow peacebuilding; and development of community wellness to preventatively stave off violence through increased community cohesion.

The paper is the basis of original research.

The primary objective of the paper is to present the role and meaning of fear in organizations implementing TQM. The author's intention is to identify the causes of fear in the TQM components as well as the main types of fear, their causes, consequences and methods of reduction.

The main research method applied is a systematic review of the literature on the subject. The applied systematic review procedure takes into consideration the indicated research objective, the selection of the basic literature and publications, the presentation of the publication database and content analysis. The author also makes use of his own observations ensuing from his acting in the capacity of a TQM consultant and a juror of the Polish Quality Award.

The paper presents the causes of fear in the TQM components, the main types of fear and its consequences. The limited possibilities of eliminating fear are also indicated. Fear appears when, for various reasons, TQM is improperly implemented and maintained, but also when resources are allocated incorrectly (e.g. a wrong selection of quality team members), and it is included in social processes (e.g. in the quality team forming process). It appears when only structural empowerment rather than mental empowerment is applied, when there exist contradictory expectations with regard to empowerment, in case of excessive and/or “have to” commitment in particular employees, and when too much emphasis is placed on commitment.

The reflections included in the paper may become useful for quality management practitioners, as such knowledge allows them to avoid mistakes which are the cause of fear, that is an emotion making quality improvement difficult. The paper does not present the manifestations and sources of fear in all TQM components, and they are certainly included in a broadly understood quality culture. Nevertheless, the gathered and arranged knowledge can be the source of further research.

Being the result of the studies of the literature on the subject, this paper is one of few publications discussing in a detailed manner one of the principles of effective quality management formulated by E. Deming, namely “driving fear out”.